11. Bonnie
BONNIE
Two weeks after I leave Gage, Keeley Moxham brings a notebook to her first lesson. Flint swings away from the mounting block before she can put a foot in the stirrup.
“He does this at home,” she says when he does it a second time.
“Then we’ll spend some time on it.”
She looks toward the barrels at the far end of Cleo’s arena. Her booking message said she wanted to improve her turns. She is in her forties, owns a plumbing business with her sister, and has driven an hour to be told to stand on a wooden step.
I know how this feels. I once paid Beryl two hundred dollars to teach me that I was pulling on a horse every time I got frightened. I resented her until I rode better.
“Leave the reins loose enough for him to stand,” I tell Keeley. “Cleo will help you bring him back.”
Cleo stands at Flint’s head. I sit on a chair by the rail with my water bottle and a clipboard that has nothing on it yet. At thirty-one weeks, I have stopped pretending that teaching has to mean standing for an hour in the sun.
Flint comes beside the block. Keeley reaches for the saddle, and he moves. Cleo returns him without a fuss.
“You’re going up before he’s settled,” I say. “Wait with him.”
“How long?”
“We have the arena.”
She gives me a doubtful look but waits. The horse lowers his head. She puts a little weight in the stirrup and takes it out again. This time he stays.
“There,” I say. “Let him have that.”
She laughs, surprised by how pleased she is. A moment later I write her name on my empty page.
By the end of the lesson she has mounted three times without Flint moving away. We have not gone near a barrel. She books another lesson anyway, and writes the date in the notebook she has not opened until now.
“I thought you’d have more…” Keeley gestures at the arena, embarrassed.
“Barrels?”
“A bigger setup. Staff. I saw your name in a clinic program years ago.”
Cleo coughs into her sleeve. Keeley turns red.
“I didn’t mean the place isn’t nice.”
I look around the arena. One corner of the rail needs paint. Cleo’s son has left a yellow dump truck outside the gate. Beyond the small barn, Mercy grazes in the paddock that came with my rental.
“This works for me,” I say.
When Keeley is gone, Cleo puts the chair away and brings out the truck.
Her boy runs from the porch to meet her.
He has spent the lesson with his regular sitter, who lives nearby and knows the farm well enough to bring him home with both shoes.
One is on the wrong foot. Cleo fixes it while he explains that his truck needs hay.
“We have plenty,” she tells him.
He looks at me. “Your baby can ride in it.”
“She’ll be too big.”
“A little baby?”
“Even a little baby.”
He studies my stomach, considering the problem. Then he says Mercy can pull it and runs toward his pile of gravel before either of us can answer.
Cleo waits until he is safely on the lawn. “You look tired.”
“I taught a lesson sitting down.”
“You also hung curtains at six this morning.”
“The sun comes straight through the bedroom window.”
“You could’ve asked.”
I want to say I can hang my own curtains. I used a low step, and I was careful, and I hate how often I need help. Instead I tell her that next time I will. She gives me the little truck to carry while she takes the water bucket.
Inside the cottage, the kitchen wall is now a warm cream. We painted it after Beryl went home, with the windows open and Cleo doing the reaching. My dishes are on the shelves. The rented bed has my own quilt, sent in a box Beryl collected from the house after asking me exactly what I wanted.
The box also held my small sewing tin. I cried while putting it on the shelf, then moved it because I hated the first place.
The cottage is outside Pueblo, far enough from Amarillo that no one can drop in because they happened to be passing.
My new obstetric practice has my records.
I have paid three months’ rent from the account that has always held my training income.
The used car I bought that first week is parked beside the porch.
There is still more in our joint account than I could spend on a house here.
My access has not changed. But Cleo is next door, Mercy is beyond the window, and nobody has made plans for what I am supposed to do in this place.
The clients I teach here are mine, even if the roof over their heads belongs to my friend. I want to stay.
I go over all of it when I wake at night and think I have made a terrible mistake.
My phone rings while I am putting the lesson money into my records. Beryl asks about Keeley before she mentions Gage.
“He sent me the nursery photograph,” she says.
“He sent it to me too.”
“He asked if I’d tell you he finally hung the curtains.”
I close the notebook. The amount Keeley paid is still visible through the thin paper.
“Did you?”
“I told him you have a phone and curtains aren’t the problem.”
From the kitchen window I can see Cleo helping her son shake a rug. He keeps standing on the end she wants to lift.
“I’m not coming back to look at furniture.”
“All right.”
“I wanted that dresser so badly.”
Beryl waits while I press a hand over my eyes. I can still see the room on my phone screen, the chair we bought together, the curtains I hemmed. I wanted to bring our daughter home to that room. I still want the husband I imagined standing in it with me.
But I would walk in and he would be pleased with himself. He would show me the drawers. I would have to ruin the evening by remembering why I left.
“The lesson went well,” I say, because I need to tell her something else.
“Tell me about the horse.”
I do. By the time we hang up, I can open the notebook and finish recording the lesson.
I open a message to Gage three times before I send it. I want him to know the baby and I are safe without giving him another chance to tell me where we belong.
I’m staying in Cleo’s cottage outside Pueblo, Colorado. My doctor has my records, and Mercy is with me. Don’t come here unless I invite you. I need space. I’ll keep you updated about the baby. I’m not coming to Texas to see the nursery.
His answer arrives while I am putting the phone away.
I changed the horse. I can’t keep canceling things until you decide it’s enough. We need to talk.
I read it twice. I did not leave because he chose the wrong horse for Tawny. He gave her my work and my clothes, then let her tell me she should have my husband too. He repeated something I trusted him with in bed. He asked me to apologize when I told him what she wanted.
He is still calling it a list of things I want canceled.
My thumb is over the keyboard before I stop. I could explain it again. I could spend the evening finding gentler words so he might read to the end. I am tired of trying to phrase my hurt in a way that will make him care about it. I put the phone facedown.
There is an email I have left unanswered since this morning. A woman who attended my demonstration in Amarillo wants to book a winter clinic. The tour office told her I was stepping back from appearances indefinitely. She is checking because I said something different when she met me.
I read indefinitely again. I knew they had given Tawny the joint dates. Now someone answering the office phone is telling a woman who wants to hire me that I am no longer available. The lie has reached a person who was never asking for Gage.
For a minute I am too angry to write anything useful. I want to call the office and make the person who said it explain why they thought they could. Then I imagine the woman waiting for an answer about her clinic, and I open my calendar.
I tell her I am still taking bookings in my own name and send the winter dates I can offer. I give her my direct number. Her reply comes before I leave for dinner. She chooses a Saturday.
I write her name on that date. Getting the work does not make me less angry, but it gives me something of my own to look forward to.
Cleo calls me over for dinner. I take the bowl of cherries I washed and a bag of the baby clothes I want to sort. Her son eats three bites of macaroni, announces that he is full, then tries to take all the cherries.
We give him some and talk about Keeley. Cleo disagrees with the exercise I want to try next week. I argue with her for ten minutes before I notice my dinner is cold.
“Here,” Cleo says, moving my plate closer. “You can tell me I’m wrong after you eat.”
Later, we sort the clothes on her sofa. The smallest yellow shirt fits across my spread hand. I hold it there while Cleo’s son leans against my leg, sticky and sleepy, asking when she will come out.
“In a little while,” I tell him.
Since I left, I have not been able to picture the day after she does. Tonight I can.